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To some extend, it's reasonable.

If somebody works at Apple, they might have access to internal iOS code or knowledge of upcoming APIs which gives them an advantage over external app developers. The person working at Apple need not be part of iOS team. They could get hands on this internal information through grapevine, friends or being in a cross-team meeting.

In such cases, there are 2 options:

(i) Allow the apps from Apple developers, not label them as belonging to Apple and pretend that the app developer has no extra advantage over external developers. This seems misleading and wrong.

(ii) The apps from Apple developers should belong to Apple.

I agree that nobody needs to shed tears for Google. However, what's more concerning here is that it's the users who would face the brunt of this decision.

I think the defaults matter a lot in such cases. Does anybody remember if that checkbox for installing google chrome was checked in by default or not?

I'm confused about their business model now. If they are opt-in, then why would anybody opt-in to them?

It seems I'm in a minority here, but I was never comfortable installing any adblock extension because the existing request blocking API means that the extension would see all web traffic generated by me (including private URLs that are otherwise not known to anybody but me).

I personally feel that now with manifest 3, I can actually install adblockers since the newer APIs do not share all my web traffic with the extensions.

Can somebody explain why removing blocking API was overall a bad decision by Chrome?

> The bar is whatever I WANT it to be, it's my machine, and it's pretentious of a software developer to assume they know what I'm using the software for and what my best interests are. For all they know I'm using the software in a museum, 20 years from now, about this era of computing.

I think that's a reasonable point of view. However, for such users, it's best not to use software that's largely developed for masses who just expect the software to work. It might be best to just checkout the source code, and build your own binary. Sorry for being rude :(

Oh, I did not know that. Are you sure that enabling studies also means that user's data is sent to Mozilla without consent? Are you sure about this?

I'm asking because there I can imagine that there is a benefit for Mozilla to develop a feature that enables studies without sending data. It could be used to fix a broken feature or a broken logic (as in the case of expired certificates here). So, I'm not convinced that enabling studies always means that your data gets uploaded without the consent. Can you point me to privacy whitepaper / source code to backup that statement?

> And now Mozilla are saying that the "fix" is to allow them to install & run "studies" on my machine? What are they smoking?

Can you elaborate what's your concern with "studies"? By installing Firefox that updates automatically, the user is already giving control of the software and letting Mozilla decide what's the best. How is modifying software logic using studies different than modifying logic by updating the binary?

> I can boot up almost any 20 year old piece of Windows software and it'll work fine, it might not make sense in the current world but it won't go "2019? Fuck off!"

Is that really true? Would it connect to 802.11m WiFi router? Would you consider it secure enough to open your banking website on it? The bar is not just booting up the machine. The bar is whether the machine is usable (secure).

> Their own customers

Can you explain what you mean? Chrome does not have any customers.

> And what delicious irony if they couldn't solve this with HTTP/2 because of servers not implementing the spec correctly or having weird undocumented quirks (their reason for not enabling pipelining despite it working just fine).

How do you envison the browser to solve this when the server is not H2 capable?

> "Note that all of these things that they are removing for “security”, could simply be gated around a permission prompt you’d have to accept, as with the contact list, or location."

I think letting the user decide on permissions works in practice only if (i) There is a good chance that an average user would understand the tradeoffs of giving different permissions to different apps (ii) A large majority of users are expected to give that permission to the app under reasonable circumstances.

If an average user does not understand the tradeoffs of giving permissions to an app, then the operating system may as well do it on behalf of the user. I think this is a common problem since an average user probably clicks arbitrarily on the permissions dialog.

Similarly, if a permission is perceived to be not useful enough by most of the users, then there is no point in even having that in the ecosystem.

This is true, but Google is also adding more search surfaces (e.g., google home, assistant etc.). So, it's possible that they might attract proportionately more users using these surfaces.

Seattle times published data of percentage of unvaccinated children in Seattle schools (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/are-measles-a...).

Each and every school in top 10 is a private school. In Seattle, private schools cost an average of $25k/year. I bet illegal immigrants are not sending their children to the private schools that cost $25k every year when public schools are free.

The top schools is Waldorf which costs $20k/year for grade 1-8 and $25k for 9-12. This fee is only for 9 months of school. This school has 22% unvaccinated children. I bet there are exactly 0 children in this school from illegal immigrant families.

Yeah, I found the article to be very confusing too. The author seems to be upset that the driver and the passenger lost a lot of money/ body parts, but Grab did not lose anything. Sure, but the author fails to explain why Gab should lose anything?

It's like complaining that my Prius had an accident with somebody's Tesla, but Toyota and Tesla CEOs did not lose anything. Why should they?

Yes, I heard 2E being recently mentioned in a public elementary school. So, it seems it's still in use.

I do not know of any place that widely proves that "state-owned and state-controlled companies" are stealing trade secrets.

Individuals, sure. State-owned companies? I would like to know the proof for this.

> You can’t just leave the country and expect the new host to not care!

That's not a fair comparison. If any law was broken, it was definitely not broken on US soil. It would be like US arresting people that it thinks committed murders in China.

> What she is alleged to have done would be a crime in Canada too so her nationality isn’t relevant.

I think it is. It's also relevant where the crime occured. e.g., lets say some small country decides that it's illegal to wear grey color pants. Then, can they morally arrest any person anywhere in the world that they think wore grey color pants at any point in the time at any place in the world?

> China and their state-owned and state-controlled companies are stealing trade secrets and military technology instead of developing it on their own.

Do you have any evidence for this? Have we arrested any US citizens for selling/leaking military technology to China?

> That's true, but Google is one of the companies that pushed very hard to make the current situation socially acceptable

Do you think the current situation would not have happened if Google was not there?

Honestly, that just seems like a coincidence. Do you have thoughts on how that information got transferred?

There are some nice things about the new UI: e.g., it's possible to take actions (such as delete) on a email in the inbox in 1-click. It's also that gmail now has lot of new things. e.g., snooze, integration with tasks which probably meant that they had to update the UI regardless.

> They want to maximize the amount of time you spend on their website.

Is that true for YouTube kids app too? I thought you could put timers using parental settings. When the timer goes off, it will lock the device. And, some N minutes before, it would show a warning as well.

That seems way better than state of the art (dumping kids in front of TV or video game consoles etc.)

> printing a password really won’t make much of a difference.

It's not just printing the password. There is also an overhead of configuring the device with a unique password.

> I won't let automation near me in medical contexts

Is that even possible? Most of the machines are run by robots these days. Even simple devices (e.g. ECG monitor) has so much automation built into them.

Get their approval to live?

> To add to this: if workers are underpaid relative to the cost of living in their area, they'll likely end up on some government assistance program.

But that was already the situation before Uber came to the market? For all we know, driving Uber might have moved some of the people less dependent on the government assistance programs.

That article mentions that bundles are supposed to arrive in Gmail soon. My point still stands that Inbox features would be not-so-difficult to add to Gmail.

It's much easier than developing and maintaining 2 apps, and testing them on variety of platforms (Web, ios, android etc.) and device/browser combinations.

It was already getting confusing with smart compose (https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/subject-write-emails-...) coming to Gmail, but not to Inbox.

> Hell, I bet there are insiders who were surprised about the decision to close up shop on Google Inbox.

Not an insider, but TBH, I was always pretty much sure that one of Gmail or Inbox will go away soon. With Gmail having more user base, it was natural for Inbox to be subsumed by gmail.

Inbox was not really fundamentally different from Gmail. It offered some new features, but I can't imagine that it would be too hard to implement them in Gmail too (e.g., snooze feature).

> engineers why they work for companies that track and addict kids.

If you think addictive games are bad, then we can go ahead and cast a moral judgement ib parents too. Parents know that games are addictive. Why are they letting their own kids play addictive games?

As far as engineers go, it is possible that they did made the game addictive specifically for <13 years old. It just happens that parents of <13 year olds let their kids play, and they are getting addicted.

> turning on/off certain features without the user's consent.

I think that in practice, that applies to only the privacy sensitive features. Would you be upset if suddenly they rolled out a feature that reduced battery consumption by 10%?

This particular case was obviously a bug, but I suppose every software manufacturer is continuously doing A/B testing, and 99% of time the user would not even notice. I would be surprised if Google was not doing A/B testing, and did not have the whole framework for doing it.